From the e-bookshelf: Edison's Conquest of Mars
H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" is one of my favourite books; as a tale of alien invasion and apocalypse, it may come as close as anything for me to that old saw of "What can measure up to the original?" It took me a while, though, to get around to reading the Project Gutenberg version of one particular and quite unofficial sequel, turned out shortly after the publication of the original in the last years of the 19th century. "Edison's Conquest of Mars," by Garrett Putman Serviss, has a peculiar charm very much unlike the original but piquant in its own way. After the end of the Martian invasion (displaced to New York, probably by pirated American versions of the original), Earth prepares to defend itself by carrying war back to the Martians through an expedition of savants led by Thomas Edison himself. This version of Edison, who turns out a portable disintegration machine and a fleet of "electric" spaceships, seems to have much more to do with his self-promotion and media image than anything the actual Edison did. It did, though, leave me contemplating just what actual person, if anyone, might be given a comparable role nowadays. A series of world leaders of the time also show up before the expedition's launch; Queen Victoria and President William McKinley are treated with respect, but Kaiser Wilhem is presented as just a bit of a blustering figure.
After a trip through space (including spacewalks in spacesuits), the expedition arrives at Mars. The Martians have very little in common with the tentacled, big-brained monstrosities of Wells's novel; instead, they look just like us only larger. There's a suggestion that the extinct inhabitants of the Moon looked just like us only larger yet, and there's a surreal moment near the end featuring an inhabitant of Ceres, who again looks just like us but is larger still. A stopover on an asteroid of pure gold, a beautiful Earth woman found captured on Mars, suggestions that the Martians were the "ancient astronauts" who built the Pyramids and Sphinx seventy-five years before that wild theory was tossed around in the general credulousness of the 1970s, Martian smokescreens (rather unlike the poisonous "Black Smoke" of Wells's novel) and a final effort to win the war by flooding the Red Planet all get tossed in before it's all over. I suppose, in looking back on it, that I didn't take the book seriously at all, but it was still kind of fun.
After a trip through space (including spacewalks in spacesuits), the expedition arrives at Mars. The Martians have very little in common with the tentacled, big-brained monstrosities of Wells's novel; instead, they look just like us only larger. There's a suggestion that the extinct inhabitants of the Moon looked just like us only larger yet, and there's a surreal moment near the end featuring an inhabitant of Ceres, who again looks just like us but is larger still. A stopover on an asteroid of pure gold, a beautiful Earth woman found captured on Mars, suggestions that the Martians were the "ancient astronauts" who built the Pyramids and Sphinx seventy-five years before that wild theory was tossed around in the general credulousness of the 1970s, Martian smokescreens (rather unlike the poisonous "Black Smoke" of Wells's novel) and a final effort to win the war by flooding the Red Planet all get tossed in before it's all over. I suppose, in looking back on it, that I didn't take the book seriously at all, but it was still kind of fun.